‘Round and ’round we go

I know I must have already mentioned somewhere that every so often I purge my drawers and closets of old stuff so that I have more room to put new stuff in.

However I’m going to have to stop doing that because the longer I live the more I see that everything that’s old does become new again. Everybody knows that fashion is cyclical and that whatever is in style now was already in some time before, will go out eventually and then come back in again.

Take glasses for instance.

I am amazed that I used to pay good money for frames that were so big they covered half of my face. Half. Which meant that the upper half of the lens was correcting my vision while the other half was doing absolutely no work. I’m thinking that I should really go back to get my refund.

These days there’s quite a bit of variety, in both shape and colour and we’ve been rocking smaller styles for years, but now some fashion icon who probably wasn’t born when I was wearing large frames has decided that it’s time – so we’re going back to big. The ingénue probably also thinks that cat eyes that were popular in the 60’s are a new fashion thing. Even reading glasses that used to hang on a chain to be surreptitiously placed on the nose now come with matching cases. Have a tendency to misplace them? You can always buy more than one.

During my childhood I was one of a few children who wore glasses, and I remember them being easy to break or get bent out of shape. When plastic frames came in we had the option of choosing between frames that had more tortoiseshell or less tortoiseshell, and even though they were slightly more fashionable, I was still known as the four eyed kid.

Clearly that stigma has passed, because these days people are using glasses when they don’t even need them. Who’d have thought that we wouldn’t consider ourselves fully dressed unless we donned a pair of no prescriptions? As a person who’s been wearing glasses for years, I’ve collected quite a few in my time – because whenever I got a new frame I would hold on to the old one for no apparent reason.